Lincoln's Blogger Madness:

I’m really getting sick of this war nonsense. Yes, that’s right. I said WAR NONSENSE.

So many people just go on and on about it. Honestly though, I enjoy my life too much to poison it with endless talk about war. If I was gung-ho against the war and was going to protests or doing something else that might actually do something, at least then I could claim I was trying to make a difference. If I was gung-ho for the war and went around with a friggin’ U.S. flag tied to my head, yeah I guess that might make a difference. But the talk about it is draining and tends to go in circles.

On a related note, I remember reading that the U.S. spends a BILLION dollars on a single stealth bomber. Maybe they’re cheaper now but still, that’s pretty steep. I’d really hate to be the guy that crashes one of those things. I got in a fender-bender once and felt stupid. But how many times do you have to say “I'm sorry” if you crash and burn a billion-dollar plane? Besides the fact that your insurance premiums would go through the roof, you’d have to start every conversation with “I’m sorry” for the rest of your life.

“Yes hi, good to meet you, total stranger. By the way, I’m sorry. Yeah, the U.S. decided they could either cure poverty or build another stealth bomber. I’m not saying they made the wrong decision or anything but I doubt I would have been able to completely crash and blow up a cure to poverty.”

I've thought a bit about the way the jobs are structured where I work. The jobs appear to be set up to create the largest possible distance between the person making the decision and the person who has to live with it.

For instance, if Bob tells Carl that Carl sucks, Carl gets mad. BUT...if Bob tells Mike to tell Judy to tell David to tell Natalie to tell Carl that Carl sucks, Carl can't really be mad at Natalie. Maybe Carl's mad at David since he figures "David is Natalie's boss". Or, if he even knows about Judy, maybe her. Or maybe not. But it basically leaves Carl with no way to really do anything. Natalie will say it's out of her hands. If it goes up to David, David will say the same thing. It's very unlikely that actually that Carl will actually get to Bob.

So Bob just keeps screwing over Carl through this ridiculous filtering system so that when people get mad, they're denied the right to blame anyone that they can actually communicate with.

This same company also enjoys making "suggestions" or "asking" employees to do something (which is really "telling" with a bad candy coating). They love to make it sound like you have a choice in the matter. And you do: take what they give you or get fired.

I'm not too big on rules. Sure, I understand a need for them. I think it's important to have some semblance of order in our lives. But far too often, people follow them blindly. How many times have you asked somebody why something is true or why something was done and they answer you with "That's the rules" or "That's our policy".

And these people cling to these answers as though that's all there is to it. Except all they've really done is provided you with a statement that's about on par with a parent telling a child "Because I said so."

These answers don't really answer anything. Mainly because in many cases, the people who follow the rules don't even know themselves why the rules are rules. Or maybe they just don't care. They just know that they have to follow them -- and for a lot of people, that's enough. Which scares the hell out of me.

You can call it rules, policy, procedures, regulations, tradition, etc. Doesn't matter. It basically boils down to this: "A long time ago, someone came up with this way of doing stuff. At the time, they may have had a good reason to come up with this. Or maybe they stumbled upon this way by accident. Or maybe they decided to do it this way because it served their own interests. I'm not really sure because I don't understand the point of this rule. However, because it is still a rule, everyone has to live by it, including you."

For every rule out there, there should be a reason behind it. And too many people aren't asking for these reasons. Or when they do, they don't get answers so they eventually give up. And people just accept it.

A few years ago, a certain company that will remain nameless had a policy (one that I think is still in effect) that any woman wearing a skirt or dress had to wear nylons or stockings or whatever. Fine -- I imagine the rule was designed so that women wouldn't be coming to work showing two feet of leg. But some supervisors at work decided that they should go around and actually ask women to lift the bottoms of their dresses. To PROVE they were wearing nylons. My thinking is that if you can't actually see if someone's wearing them, then it's not bloody relevant. Get on with your life.

Okay, first off – I’ve had a rough week and needed to get the hell out of the office which is why I opted to leave my healthy lunch that I brought to work for tomorrow while I went out, relaxed and ate packaged crap.

So I go to McDonalds. I get exact change ready. Now I know that if I sat there with a big pile of pennies and a goofy grin on my face, the woman there (same one as on Feb. 21!) would have a right to be a little pissed at me. But I had a bill, some loonies, quarters, a few dimes and a penny. Not too much to handle. So she sits there counting out the change. And re-counting. And re-counting. She holds out the change and re-counts it in front me. The total was $11.36 and somehow she got to $11.21. Some crazy mix-up involving her counting “75” for the three quarters but then for the six dimes, going “85, 95, 05, 10, 15, 20”.

So either she’s an alchemist who has the power to turn three of my dimes into nickels or she needs some math lessons. Which could go a long way to explaining why a woman in her mid-30s is working the drive-thru at McDonalds. During the day. Which means she’s probably not a student who works at McDonalds to give her some pocket change while living under someone else’s roof: this job could well be the only thing standing between her and homelessness. I'd feel bad if she wasn't so useless.

After me trying to show her how it counted up properly, her stupid mind changed one of my nickels back to a dime (it’s like magic!) and now she’s at $11.26 – SO close. Then she goes “Never mind, go on, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” Yep. The customer’s always wrong. When the employee is a bitchy alchemist wannabee. Once again, this is why you work at McDonalds, you rude, math-challenged harpy.

Anybody see that news conference with Bush last night? My God. Oh well, when he’s out of office, I guess at the very least he can claimed that he used the term “weapons of mass destruction” in one hour more than any other president. Good for you, George. Maybe one day you’ll be a real boy.

I don’t believe anything that man says. Not that I tend to pay a great deal of attention to U.S. Politics but I at least attached some credibility to things that Clinton said. Not this guy. He could tell me that smoking is bad for me and I might take up smoking just because I’d be afraid he was lying.

The guy’s like a cartoon. Especially when it comes to this whole good and evil business. If you’re a president, you really shouldn’t be tossing out words like “evil” all that much. Doesn’t do much for your credibility. Sure, good and evil works great – in comic books. And movies. Supernatural thrillers maybe. Not real life, George.

He probably sees himself in red, white and blue tights with a big cape with an American flag on it, standing on the top of the White House, cape blowing in the breeze. And then he pictures Saddam Hussein going “Broohahahahah! Silly U.S.! Your do-gooderness is NO MATCH for my unstoppable AXIS OF EVIL! BWAHAHAHAHA!” and then Bush says “Not so fast, Evil Saddam! When I get the rest of the Justice League of America assembled, your Axis will crumble faster than my momma’s brownies!”

I haven't had the time to update my actual "Laughs" page on my site so whenever I think of new jokes, I'll probably just post back on this page. Feel free to visit this page regularly to see if I have any new rants/jokes/etc. I'll try to post stuff on here as often as I can (hopefully something every week or so anyway).

And here's the actual jokes:

Personality Tests

Sometimes in my email I get these personality tests where you get asked to choose your favourite colour or animal or even cake and depending on what you choose, that's supposed to say something about what kind of person you are. Like black forest cake might mean you're romantic and carrot cake means you're friendly and spunky.

But sometimes I wonder: what kind of cake is there for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer? Not that he was a big cake fan anyway. But I think we need a personality profile type deal for people like that. So he looks at his cake, reads the profile and it says "You are a mass murderer" and he's like "Why do I keep choosing that? Every time!"

Naked News

So you may have heard that there's a show called the Naked News that was on the internet and now you can buy it on pay-per-view. The deal is basically a news show except women take their clothes off while they deliver the news. This is terrible. Now all the perverts are going to be harder to spot and avoid because they're going to be better informed. They'll actually be able to walk around just like us and start talking about the news. But I think I know how we can detect them: these people will be a little TOO eager to share their information with the rest of us. So next time someone walks up to you and says "the Dow's up 2 points today", we can just say “Why don’t you just rent porn like the rest of them, pervert?”

Flying Space Cars

I remember I used to watch older movies and a bunch of them seemed to indicate that by the year 2000 or so, we’d have flying space cars. I was very excited about this. All the time growing up, no matter how much life sucked, I kept telling myself “It’ll be okay – in a few more years, we’ll have flying space cars.” Even though there was little evidence to support this, I still believed it because the movies said so. Well, the year 2000 has come and gone – where the hell’s the space cars? This world sucks! I think all technological innovations should be put on hold until every one of us has a flying space car.

For anyone writing a thesis on how people are becoming more and more obsessed with instant gratification, I think reality shows might make a good example to prove your case. Reality shows completely fit in with the whole “instant gratification” principle: none of these shows are the kinds of things that anyone wants to watch again (then again, someone might prove me wrong and release a Joe Millionaire DVD).

When was the last time they showed a re-run of the Bachelor or Joe Millionaire? Maybe within the same week or so for those who missed it, but not after that. Like reality shows, a lot of other shows keep you hooked by offering surprises, new things unfolding before you, etc. But when normal shows have aired, you can still watch them again: sure, now you know what happens and how it ends but often the acting, plotline(s), etc. are good enough that you could watch it again.

But once a reality show has aired, the surprises are gone and all that’s left is a bunch of people clumsily plodding through until the end of the episode. I’m sure there’s some people who’d want to watch that multiple times but doesn’t sound appealing to me. These shows have no shelf life, no syndication, no place in history. Not that they aspire to any of these things. I doubt they’re out to make money from DVD sales/rentals or to “make their mark” or even to be remembered in the next five or ten years. They just want to make something dirt-cheap, get amazing ratings and if they vanish forever after that, they can always crank out more mass-appeal crap.

So between the last year or so and now, we’ve had the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, Are You Hot? (a show designed to find the sexiest people in America…without this show, I guess we’d be clueless), The Family (the show is advertised as a family that basically backstabs each other to win a million bucks…oh well at least they’re honest about it), Meet My Folks (a show that rips off the Meet The Parents concept except there’s no Robert DeNiro, Ben Stiller or anyone else worth watching) and Married By America (I think they've now gone to the bottom of their list of bad ideas and after being told that "Dogs That Shoot Rocket Launchers...For Cash" and "Oh My God! I'm having lunch with a cannibal!" were too risky, this was the next-worst idea).

These shows are not going to go away until we get a million signatures on a petition that says “Yes, finally by virtue of comparison alone, the Jerry Springer show DOES now look like intelligent programming.”